empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at https://w3id.org/empathi/

Steps towards interoperability in healthcare environment

Tese doutoramento - Programa Doutoral em Engenharia Biomédica, Informática MédicaHealthcare units have complex Information Systems (IS) made up from heterogeneous data sources, which speak di erent languages and with di erent objectives. Nevertheless, all these sources have indeed important information that can contribute in an active way to provide a healthcare system of excellence. The evolution that has been noticed in Health IS has promoted the development of new methodologies and tools that are intended to solve this complicated problem. In this manner, one of the main paradigms that arises is the interoperability among systems and its capability to allow a general and simpli ed access to relevant information. Another aspect that should be kept in mind, given the constrains of the global economic situation, is the reduction in the investment in national healthcare systems. This thesis is based on a set of studies performed at the Centro Hospitalar do T^amega e Sousa (CHTS) in which the main goals are promoting an improvement in the relation patient-hospital, having in consideration the reduction of implementation costs, but preserving the quality of information. The last one should be accessible everywhere and at anytime to help with clinical decision and, in the future, be available for clinical studies through data computationally interpretable. To do so, an Electronic Semantic Health Record was formalized and implemented, with the help of the clinical sta , which collects all the information considered important and relevant. This Health Record was delivered through a platform for the distribution and archive of clinical information, named Agency for the Integration, Di usion and Archive (AIDA), which is supported by intelligent agents that treat data in an ex-haustive and structured way. To test the proposed model and system and in order to strengthen the relation between the patient and the hospital, an appointment alert system based on SMS and electronic mail was developed, which allowed the reduction of non-programmed misses and that provided a decrease of costs by better re-distributed appointment schedules, and allocate human resources and physical spaces in a more e ective manner. Finally, to reduce stopping periods of systems and to promote the user's con dence on Information Systems, an open-source tool was developed that enables the scheduling of preventive actions according to a mathematical model. These tools allowed for a continuous improvement of systems and are currently well accepted by clinicians and Information Technologies (IT) specialists inside the healthcare unit, proving in real clinical situation the e ectiveness and usability of the model.As unidades de saúde possuem Sistemas de Informação (SI) complexos, compostos por fontes de dados heterogéneas com objectivos distintos. Por em, toda a informação e importante e pode contribuir de forma ativa para a prestação de cuidados de saúde de excelência. Com a evolução dos SI na Saúde novas metodologias têm sido desenvolvidas com o intuito de solucionar este problema complicado. Nesta perspectiva, um dos principais paradigmas que se coloca e a interoperabilidade entre sistemas e a sua capacidade para permitir um acesso simples a informação relevante. Outro factor relevante relaciona-se com os constrangimentos financeiros que toda a economia global atravessa e que se reflete numa diminuição no investimento nos servi cos nacionais de saúde. Esta tese tem como base um conjunto de estudos realizados no Centro Hospitalar do Tâmega e Sousa cujos principais objetivos se prendem com um esforço orientado para a melhoria da relação paciente-hospital, tendo em conta a redução de custos de implementação, mas garantindo sobretudo a qualidade de informação. Esta dever a estar disponível em qualquer lugar e a qualquer altura para o auxílio a decisão clinica e, em última instancia, disponível para estudos cl nicos através de dados interpretáveis computacionalmente. Para tal, recorreu-se a ajuda de pessoal clinico para a implementação de um Processo Clínico Eletrónico Semântico que recolhe toda a informação considerada relevante. Este Processo Clínico foi potenciado através de uma plataforma para a distribuição e arquivo de informação clinica, denominada de Agencia para a Interoperação, Difusão e Arquivo (AIDA), baseada em agentes inteligentes que tratam os dados de forma estruturada. Para testar o modelo e de forma a fortalecer a relação paciente-hospital foi desenvolvido um sistema de alertas para consulta via mensagens escritas e e-mail, que diminuiu o numero de faltas não programadas, proporcionando uma redução de custos através de uma redistribuição dos tempos de consulta alocando recursos humanos e físicos de forma mais eficaz. Por fim, com vista a redução dos tempos de paragem de sistemas, e potenciar a confiança dos utilizadores nos mesmos, foi desenvolvida uma ferramenta baseada em tecnologia open-source que permite o agendamento de intervenções preventivas de acordo com um modelo matemático. Esta ferramenta proporcionou uma melhoria contínua dos sistemas e está globalmente aceite por cl nicos e especialistas de Tecnologias de Informação (TI), provando em situações clínicas reais a usabilidade e eficácia do modelo

DoRES — A Three-tier Ontology for Modelling Crises in the Digital Age

During emergency crises it is imperative to collect, organise, analyse and share critical information between individuals and humanitarian organisations. Although different models and platforms have been created for helping these particular issues, existing work tend to focus on only one or two of the previous matters. We propose the DoRES ontology for representing information sources, consolidating it into reports and then, representing event situation based on reports. Our approach is guided by the analysis of 1) the structure of a widely used situation awareness platform; 2) stakeholder interviews, and; 3) the structure of existing crisis datasets. Based on this, we extract 102 different competency questions that are then used for specifying and implementing the new three-tiers crisis model. We show that the model can successfully be used for mapping the 102 different competency questions to the classes, properties and relations of the implemented ontology

Literature and sustainability

Sustainability has become a key socio-political issue over recent years. However, whilst the literary-critical community has advanced enthusiastically on an exciting range of environmentally-based analyses (most obviously through the work of ecocriticism), its response specifically to sustainability—as an attempt to reconceptualise the way we live, as an idea with a particular history, and as a ubiquitous term driven through over-use to near meaninglessness—has been extremely limited. The basic idea of the volume is to make a start on filling this gap. Split into four sections: Historicising sustainability, Discourses of sustainability, The sustainability of literature, Sustainability in literature – it has some very good contributors, and starts off with an introduction about the history of the term, looks at its beginnings in the C19th, and goes onto show how contemporary authors are dealing with it including Jeanette Winterson, Michel Houellebecq, Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh

A Political Reading of Humanness : Crianca-Irân and Power Configurations in Guinea-Bissau

Tese especialmente elaborada para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Ciência PolíticaThis dissertation analyses power principles and configurations in Guinea Bissau’s pluralistic political scenario, as highlighted by the phenomenon of the criança-irân (spirit-children). Working within a political theory framework, the grounds for the analysis are endogenous conceptualisations of humanness. The qualitative study takes an interpretivist epistemological and inductive-deductive approach. Its conceptual groundwork is in political relations and intersubjectivity (Levinas, [1946/7] 1987; Bongmba, 2001, Han, [2005] 2019); biopolitics (Agamben, 1995, 1996); communitarian political community (Menkiti, 2002, 2004, Gyekye, 2003, Wiredu, 2001); and the Africanisation of power (Chabal, 1992). The thesis offers an analytical model comprising of three category-concepts: bíos zōḗ, nomos, and locus. The phenomenon of the criança-irân complements the conceptual framework as analytical lenses. The existence of these liminal and hybrid beings (neither human or spirit) points to the threshold ordering relations of power between a political subject (ego) and political subjects other than oneself (alter). The centrality of intersubjective relations, along with the ontological relevance of community and kin (djorson), past-ward temporality, and land (tchon) show the binomial ego-djorson as foundational to the political community. The endogenous polity devises a configuration of power (nomos) that combines the symbolic duties of chiefs with communal councils. As these give preference to participatory, dialogical, and consensual politics, they reveal intersubjective power relations at odds with the foundational principles of the official state nomos. The criança-irân is the signifier of humanness, political relations, and the order of the polity. Broad acknowledgement or acceptance of the phenomenon augments the intermingling of power principles and configurations beyond the institutionalised nomoi. The political space is an example of Africanisation, generated by the syncretism of endogenous and exogenous conceptualisations of power. The result is a hybrid space in which several loci of the political coexist and intertwine.N/

Performative Parenting: Social Norms and Fathers' Use of Parental Leave Entitlements

Fathers’ use of parental leave is a crucial policy issue in relation to gender equality and at the root of gendered caring norms and unequal divisions of labour throughout the life course. Using comparative mixed methods and a framework that conceptualises parenting as gendered and performative (Butler, 1999), this research contributes knowledge of the influence on fathers’ parental leave decisions of three dimensions of norms: policy, discourse and cultural norms; workplace cultures; and peer and family group norms. I compare the effect of social norms on the decisions made by fathers working for the same multinational firm in three countries: the UK, Sweden and Portugal. I argue that a Butlerian understanding can help answer the question frequently posed in the literature: why, when we know couples have egalitarian intentions prior to the birth of a first child, do couples slip back into conservative gender roles once the child has arrived (Fox, 2019; Grunow and Veltkamp, 2016; Miller, 2011)? I provide a comparative backdrop to the three focus countries, to contextualise the path dependencies underpinning the enabling parental leave policy and culture in Sweden and the contradictory and ambiguous parental leave policies and cultures in the UK and Portugal. I use data from the 2017 wave of the European Values Study to demonstrate the differences in attitudes towards gender roles between the three countries. I find that overall, Sweden holds the most egalitarian values, followed by the UK, and then Portugal, where the data reflects ‘normative ambiguity’ (Wall, 2015). I then theorise the extent to which each of the three domains of norms shaped fathers’ use of leave in the three countries, through analysis of qualitative data collected in 45 interviews with fathers. I argue that the widespread normative support for gender equality embedded in Swedish culture, alongside the enabling policy framework first introduced in 1974, contributed to the existence of a robust ‘citation’ (Butler, 1993) for fathers’ use of parental leave entitlements, which cannot fully exist in Portugal and the UK under the current discursive and material conditions. My argument, via a Butlerian critique of regulation that posits parental leave policy frameworks as both regulated by and regulating gender, thus contributes to the body of work foregrounding the centrality of non-transferable leave entitlements to fathers’ use of leave. At work, despite conducting interviews with fathers at the same firm in each country, organisational culture was highly divergent between the nations. Bringing organisational culture studies together with Butler’s performative ontology of gender, I thus theorise organisational culture as gender regulation and conceptualise the ‘performative breadwinner’, articulating the inability of many of the fathers to cease reproducing the masculine ‘ideal worker’ norm. The micro-level insights documented demonstrate how fathers’ everyday experiences are shaped by cultural backdrop, peer behaviour and forms of social constraint that form the choice architecture that shapes individual decisions. The research offers an original, granular account of the iterative process through which ‘father-friendly’ leave entitlements, combined with discursive changes, contribute to wider uptake of leave entitlements, and how shifts in norms over time are made possible – or not – through citationality.ESR

Ruptures

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit. Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola

Ruptures: Anthropologies of discontinuity in times of turmoil

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit. Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola. Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy